How did you get into chickens??

[gmendoza]

Grab a hen,like so.

take legs and separate.

Lube your body with grease because space is a issue inside hen.

Insert self into hen thru vent.

Best bet: crawl around til you spot an egg,get inside egg to be ready to hatch.

 

[Teresaann24]

I got into chickens when my daughter wanted a rooster..LOL Out of the blue she was like I want a rooster and I am like WHAT???? We got our 1st chicken a little Bantam game hen and being very chicken dumb she flew away and was never seen again..LOL A few weeks later we got two silkie gave to us and here we are 4 years later still raising silkies

 

[heather112588]

When i was younger, we raised ducks by accident (our cat got into the duck's nest in our yard...we had no choice). We currently own 40 acres of woodland but have never had any farm type animals. I played around with gardening and thus started the idea of self sufficency. My county BF helped provoke the idea. We started with 4 chicks, now have 10 chickens.

 

[thebirdguy]

When I was a little kid we used to order from Murray McMurray every 2-3 years and hatched our own the other years.. I always had "my" chick every year and had my own flock of australorps by the time I was 12.. I sold eggs to the neighbors and been hooked ever since.. Then we moved, I went to college, got married and life happened... I have been chickenless for about 25 years. We just bought 10 acres and can't wait to get our house built and move... I built an incubator and we hatched our first batch 10 days ago.. sold some and kept 15 (1 didn't make it). Now we have 14 chicks in the living room, another 63 eggs in the bator and plans for a hatch in March and one in April.

And so it begins!!!

 

[Chickenfur]

We got our first ones the spring of 09, from a guy we met in farm and fleet. We were both looking at feeders, and started talking. We got his phone number and a couple weeks later we were at his house picking out Rhode Island Red and Black Star chicks. He ended up giving them to us for free, to help us get started, really nice guy. We ended up getting 12 RIRs and 6 BS pullets, trying to get 12 hens, 6 of each. What we got, was ten RIR roosters. We got rid of 8 of the roos, and held on to 2 hoping they might be pullets. They weren't. We decided to free-range them. That fall, we lost all but 2 BSs and 1 RIR hen on they same night, and one of the BS hens was gone by the next afternoon.We still don''t know what happened to them, we never even found any feathers. A month or two later we got 3 Buff Orpington hens, 1 Black Australorp hen, 1 Cukoo Maran hen, and KFC, our Light Brahma roo. One of the BOs never laid a single egg and had a bad wing that we could never get a look at. None of the chickens above are still alive. The BA, Acorn, hatched four chicks from our garden the summer after we got her, they hatched out half and half, one of the roos had a crooked beak, and to bring down numbers one winter we sold both the roos. Acorn disappeared last summer, we think she went to hatch eggs again, and didn't make it back. A coyote got KFC a few months ago. The rest either died of the cold or we sold. After that we ordered from hatcheries.

 

[AnaD]

My BF is really into no till gardening and we are both interested in knowing where our food comes from so it was natural for us to get chickens...We see them all over town and thought we could handle it. It started out as his project, but as soon as we got our first fully feathered chicks it was clear that I would be playing the main roll in chicken keeping. When two turned out to be roos we got three chicks...and now I love chickens! I wonder how I never could have thought about them before.They really tickle my sense of asthetics. They are like animated lawn ornaments.

 

[JustAChickenLittle&More]

Lets see! I worked with a woman who wanted my oldest son to build her a nice chicken coop. He designed it and built it at age 26. It was wonderful. Then she ordered tons of baby chicks from MacMurrays. So she had me chick sit when she went to visit her daughter. I became attached to all her chickens and that nice coop. But as they got older, the big roo's she had used to go after me when I came to feed and I had to chase them away, several times. Several of them would not back down until after a while.

But the next thing I know, I ordered my own chicks. Then I got deeper into chickens and bought from breeders, and so on and so on and here we are with two bators full, some hatching today some hatching tomorrow and some hatching next week and the week after, and who knows after that.

 

[Cat Water]

It started out on vacation in Delaware at my grandparents' house. I looked over at thier neighbor's farm, and saw three broody, wild, Canadian geese each sitting on a nest of six eggs each. Then I got the bright idea to take one or two and hatch them myself and take them home. I did hours of research on how to incubate eggs and why they were good pets to convince my dad to let me get them. I asked him one last time and he said, "No geese. MAYBE chickens, but NO geese." So I got back on the computer and did hours more of research, picking breeds, picking coops, calculating prices, and after I got home and asked my mother repetitively, they finally said yes. So I got on Craigslist and found four silkie chicks for sale. One blue, one splash, one red, and one partridge. I picked them up on July 4, 2010. We had also ordered six chicks from My Pet Chicken and they came in the mail on July 7, 2010. That was long and explicit, but that was how I got started.

 

[chickaddict]

Quite by accident.

I was complaining to a friend of mine about the massive ant problem in our back yard. I raised sons in my back yard not a lawn. We had thousands of ant hills and no grass. Evertime I tried planting grass seeds the ants took them.

She said to get a couple of chickens and that would be the end of the ant problem.

I got 3 RIR's from a feed store and my addiction was born.

I currently have 14 and if it were up to me I'd have 50.

 

[Q9]

Preparing for economic doomsday, actually. More recently, we've gotten into the organic-farming stuff, so even if there is no general breakdown, we'll still be raising chickens for the fresh eggs - and the sheer fun of it. Seriously, those birds are incredibly therapeutic.